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Friday, August 21, 2015

Learning From Imperial Nostalgia

An article about imperial nostalgia reprinted from Foreign Policy with more maps:

Published by the French Communists in the 50s, found on this great site

In
bookstores around the world, there are undoubtedly Marxist professors
eager to talk at length about the evils of U.S. imperialism. But only in
Turkey, it seems, are they quite so eager to hold up Ottoman
imperialism as the more enlightened alternative: the American and
British empires dominated the Middle East through military force, the
lecture goes, purely to exploit its resources. The Ottomans, by
contrast, secured the consent of the governed by providing them with
stability, justice, and prosperity. Really, in light of the Ottoman
government’s inclusive political practices, you could hardly call it an
empire at all.

An American more confident in being able to
translate the phrase “arsenal of democracy” might have countered that it
was really the United States that had the empire so great that it
wasn’t really an empire at all. If anything, the American Empire was an empire of liberty, an empire by invitation, perhaps, welcomed around the world for replacing chaos and want with order and wealth

There is a long history
of people championing imperialism as a more civilized alternative to
violent instability—and an equally long tradition of haggling over whose
empire did it better. Many of these arguments, like those above, depend
on selective readings of history that downplay or ignore the role of
violent coercion in imperial rule. Sufficiently romanticized, this sort
of imperial nostalgia can even be marshaled in support of
quintessentially liberal proposals for establishing international order
and peace, such as the UN or EU. Consider
the career of Otto von Habsburg: born as the crown prince of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto subsequently became an outspoken advocate
of European integration, invoking the supposed success of Habsburg rule
while serving as president of the International Paneuropean Union and a
leading member of the EU’s European Parliament.

But in the face of global instability, others have been drawn to a different, more realist version of imperial nostalgia,
one that embraces imperialism’s reliance on violence in order to argue
that only force can bring much-needed order to a dangerous world. It’s
not that anyone is arguing for a contemporary reconquest of the
non-Western world, of course. But plenty of people draw on the imperial
past to justify their faith that U.S. military power can reliably deal
with recalcitrant Third World states. Unlike the less violent
alternative, this version of imperial nostalgia seeks to preempt liberal
criticism about the horrors of empire with an appeal to steely-eyed
realpolitik.

No less than rose-tinted imperial nostalgia, though,
the fixation with force ignores the fact that most imperialists
succeeded by using a mix of consent and coercion carefully calibrated to
the conditions they faced. More important, Western imperialism
flourished, for a time, by maintaining a clear distinction between
realms of coercion and realms of consent—that is, a distinction between
much weaker Third World regions that could be controlled by force and
more powerful imperial rivals that required careful diplomacy and
well-coordinated cooperation.

The problem for neoimperialists
today is that it is not at all clear where this line should be
maintained. For example, the threat of U.S. military power may have
helped in ending Libya’s nuclear program, but it remains largely
irrelevant in addressing the much greater danger posed by a nuclear
Pakistan. The ongoing debate over how best to deal with Iranian nuclear
ambitions reflects in part wildly divergent perceptions that exist over
how effective force might be in the case of Iran.

Imperial nostalgia naturally tends to focus on the empires that
prevailed. But, as the particularly bloody history of eastern Europe and
the Balkans reveals, trying to establish an empire in the wrong place
and rule the wrong people by force can have catastrophic consequences.
Which is why, shorn of any nostalgia, the history of imperialism,
complete with its successes and failures, offers a surprisingly
pragmatic argument for a more multilateral, less imperial, foreign
policy today.

GOLDEN AGE

The golden age of European
imperialism was, by the low standards Europeans set for themselves, a
golden age of European cooperation as well. As has often been noted, the
United Kingdom and France built their empires during a century when the
much-lauded “Concert of Europe” prevented open conflict on the
continent. For a time, before the peace broke down, European powers
maintained their global rule by bringing order to the colonies at
gunpoint and maintaining it among themselves through deft diplomacy.

With
Russia, for example, England’s imperial rival for much of the century,
open conflict erupted only once, and very briefly, during the Crimean
War. And even if, as many argue, World War I broke out either because
Germany wanted a larger piece of the imperial pie or because the martial
approach so central to imperial rule eventually consumed all involved,
it did not wholly negate the role of imperial cooperation. The United
Kingdom won the war, in part, because it had been sufficiently willing
over the past century to share the spoils of its imperial order with the
United States, giving the United States a vested interest in coming to
the rescue.

In the Third
World, however, Washington, for all its anti-imperial rhetoric,
maintained something much closer to a traditional imperial order,
relying on coups, assassinations, and, at times, outright invasion to
sustain U.S. power.
The United States, in turn, built and maintained its global power by
subtly managing the distinction between places where it largely relied
on forceful coercion and those where it took a more collaborative
approach. Teddy Roosevelt,
for example, was a committed internationalist who simultaneously helped
build a U.S. empire in Latin America. A similar distinction prevailed
during the Cold War: in western Europe, U.S. influence took the form of
NATO. While the Soviets tried, and failed, to rule their eastern
European empire by force, Washington used the North Atlantic alliance to
establish a true “empire by invitation” and maintained it in the same
spirit. When France withdrew from the NATO command structure in 1966, to
cite the most famous example, the United States didn’t send tanks into
Paris the way the Soviets did in Budapest and Prague.

Map of the "Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" in a Japanese propaganda booklet (1943)

In the
Third World, however, Washington, for all its anti-imperial rhetoric,
maintained something much closer to a traditional imperial order,
relying on coups, assassinations, and, at times, outright invasion to
sustain U.S. power. No one was more bitterly attuned to the hypocrisy of
American anti-imperialism than British colonial officials, many of whom
spent the early Cold War writing peevish memos
to complain as Washington stole their empire out from under them. Some
even seemed to suggest that in presenting itself as an anti-imperial
force in the world, the United States was no better than imperial Japan,
which had framed its own imperial ambitions in the anti-imperial rhetoric of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The point here, though, is not about U.S. hypocrisy. Rather,
after peeling away the rhetoric, it becomes clear that whatever they
said, U.S. policymakers maintained a fairly clear sense of where they
could rely on coercion and where they would be better off taking a more
collaborative approach. The supposedly realpolitik-driven
neoimperialists of today must also be able to draw such a divide. After
all, the British Empire didn’t transform itself into a commonwealth
because its leaders went wobbly, any more than Russian President
Vladimir Putin built a post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States
because he cares about their common wealth. Rather, these
transformations happened because the vast disparity in power that made
it possible for imperial powers to rule large swaths of the world
through force disappeared, and those imperial powers had to come up with
a new plan.

EMPIRE'S LESSONS

The
Austro-Hungarian Empire was not a nineteenth-century version of the EU,
nor was the Ottoman Empire the paragon of liberal tolerance its
admirers sometimes imagine it to be. But it also wasn’t the brutal,
bloodthirsty despotism remembered in angry Balkan histories or
Islamophobic screeds.
Imperialism’s realist admirers need look no farther than eastern Europe
and the Balkans to find an example of the dangers of ambiguity over who
is colonizable and who isn’t. In addition to being associated with the
worst excesses of modern nationalism, this region experienced violent
forms of Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Soviet rule during the
course of the twentieth century. During and after World War I, U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson’s push for anti-imperial national
self-determination focused on the Balkans and eastern Europe. Whereas German propaganda naturally focused on British and French overseas colonies, U.S. propaganda highlighted the “subject nationalities of the German Alliance.”
Allied victory in the war, coupled with power disparities and
prevailing Western racism, helped cement the consensus, for a little
while, at least, that imperial rule was suitable for Africa and Asia,
but not for what was considered the most backward part of the European
continent. The League of Nations struggled with this tension
between imperialism and internationalism from the outset, but the real
problems came when Nazi Germany refused to accept Europe’s new consensus
on who could be colonized. As detailed by Columbia University Professor
Mark Mazower in his book Hitler’s Empire,
the Germans, armed with their own redirected form of racism, sought to
violently impose their own imperial order on eastern Europe, the
Balkans, and then eventually all of Europe.

German rule in the Balkans was both a moral catastrophe and
exceedingly short-lived. What’s more, the turmoil induced by its failure
led directly to the establishment of a Soviet empire in the region and
to the Cold War. Moscow was able to maintain some power at gunpoint, but
its empire lasted barely half a century in the face of popular
opposition. By comparison, European empires in the Third World lasted
over a century in some cases, before Europeans lost the surfeit of force
necessary to sustain them. In Europe, the Germans and the Russians
never quite achieved it, and their empires, unable to rule by consent or
coercion, came to a much quicker end.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire
was not a nineteenth-century version of the EU, nor was the Ottoman
Empire the paragon of liberal tolerance its admirers sometimes imagine
it to be. But it also wasn’t the brutal, bloodthirsty despotism
remembered in angry Balkan histories or Islamophobic screeds. These
empires, like the United States today, secured a measure of stability
and regional integration through a combination of coercion and consent.
Writing violence out of the history of any empire is no less absurd than
embracing violence as the path to postnational stability under the
guise of realism. The challenge of ensuring justice and order in a
chaotic world is daunting enough without the distraction of either one
of these delusions.

More important, the part of the globe that
can be dominated through force alone has shrunk over the past century.
It’s a lesson the United States confronted in Iraq and Libya—and one
that the Turkish government, whose imperial nostalgia has taken a
newfound interest in force, risks learning in Syria. Those seeking to
preserve the U.S.-led global order might do well to look toward the
strategies that sustained it in regions where American statesmen always
realized coercion would not suffice.